#solidwastedisposal

It could’ve been just another day at work for Mukesh, with his eagle sharp eyes scavenging for something worth a day’s square meal near the mountain where all the rich men discarded the things they no longer needed. The mountain was growing higher everyday as the rich mens’ graves dug deeper on their road to development. Mukesh had seen this mountain as a kid, it wasn’t so much of a mountain back then. Just about the size of a hill maybe. He used to come here with his father, when it was his duty to win the bread for the household. Over the past three decades he has seen the hill grow into a mountain alongside him, as he grew into a Man himself. Calling him a man though would be a bit of a mistake, his kind were never considered worthy of that title by the society. They were lesser, always destined to be lesser. The impurest creation of heavenly creatures that were given the opportunity to be put on this earth just to clean up after the rich men were done defecating.

Something was different that day, he could sense it with every step he took. This was his playground, his hideout, an now his workplace (talk about being passionate about your job); he knew this mountain at the back of his hand. He saw something glittery, it was probably a discarded phone and he knew what a fortune that could be! Those things could get him enough money to last for a week’s food for the family. But it was further up on the steep slope, he had never trekked up those altitudes before. In his community they say a ghost eats up those who try to reach the top of the mountain and anyone who tried to be ambitious and trek up, never returned. Mukesh wasn’t one with a faint heart, in fact his mother always told everyone that he was the prophetical saviour for their community and one day he would save all of them from the misery that their lives have been for centuries.
 So Mukesh started trekking up and got pretty close to his trophy, and then just when it seemed like he could grab it; the earth below him broke and the mountain came tumbling down on him. This happened in such a minute fraction of a second that nobody saw him getting crushed under the weight of 25000 metric tonnes of a mountain; but there was another burden that caused his death by crushing him underneath and sadly nobody saw it happen either because it happened over centuries of exploitation.

 
When the mountain went on to further tumble down on  one of the rich men’s vehicles, the authorities heard about it and put the disaster on priority . Then by accident they found Mukesh’s body while finding the rich men’s. They started investigating into who exactly they needed to put the blame on. Who had the time to investigate the real causes anyway. Apparently the mountain was deemed unsafe 15 years ago, but nobody bothered warning Mukesh and his kind; instead they gave them more garbage to scavenge through. So much so that the mountain overshot its optimum height by 4 times, at 60 metres high only a little smaller than the Qutub Minar, this is a 21st century monument. This is what the civilisation will be
 remembered for, the garbage that we produced that ate us in the end. 

The world has already forgotten Mukesh, it never knew him in the first place. He and a lot of his friends from the community were collectively given one identity; “Kachre Wala” or the Garbage Man. The rich weren’t rich enough to give them more identities. Mukesh the prophetic messiah that he was promised to be, had heard of a different world where workplaces don’t stink of dead meat; and that to get to those workplaces one must first go to another place called School. So he sent his children to those places, and very recently his daughter Munni told him that there is a certain place called Swedesh or Sweden she wasn’t sure but they ran out of garbage so they import it now from other countries. She asked her father if he could send them some of the garbage from their mountain so that the could earn some money and he wouldn’t have to toil through the day. What she probably hadn’t learnt yet was that in a country like Sweden, his father wouldn’t have a job because they don’t  have the concept of Higher and Lower men in that dreamland. In Sweden, her father too could demand his right to a humane workplace.